Admiral Financial Services Limited (AFSL), part of FTSE 100 company Admiral Group, has selected challenger credit reference agency Credit Kudos to provide Open Banking data to initially help with income verification in a bid to support consumers across its personal loan products. 

This partnership will provide AFSL with access to additional, more up-to-date information than was previously available through traditional credit bureaus, to instantly verify an individual’s income. Over time, AFSL may use this to understand a customer’s affordability, and better assess risk using financial data.

AFSL paused lending during the COVID-19 crisis owing to the difficulties verifying income resulting from redundancies, furlough, or reduction in work. The information provided by Credit Kudos through Open Banking will help AFSL return to growth, helping the loan provider increase lending volumes responsibly. 

Freddy Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Credit Kudos, comments: “We’re seeing an increase in a range of financial institutions - not just banks - adopting Open Banking technology to steal a march on their competitors. By taking advantage of this technology, AFSL is firmly positioning itself as a pioneer in innovation and lending. Their customers who are searching for new loans – including the traditionally underserved – will soon be able to source new product offers by securely sharing data from their bank account." 

Using Credit Kudos’ embedded Open Banking journey, AFSL customers will be able to share their financial transaction data securely within their application. Once connected, Credit Kudos instantly aggregates and analyses their financial transaction data to provide AFSL with rich insights to enhance their income verification process.

Scott Cargill, CEO of Admiral Financial Services Limited, comments: “Automatically assessing income in the wake of the pandemic caused difficulties for many lenders. Through this data-driven partnership with Credit Kudos, we are now able to more quickly and more reliably assess income allowing us to responsibly increase lending volumes. Data, agility and innovation, along with a strong customer focus, is at the core of our strategy and embracing Open Banking is just one part of this. In future it will allow us to offer new, revolutionary products, and ensure we can be more responsive to our customers’ needs and quickly adapt to meet them. Through this market-first partnership we will change the way our customers, including the financially underserved, access financial services and products.”

Contour, the global trade finance network has today announced that HSBC has become the first full production member of the network following Contour’s commercial launch in October this year. HSBC is the first to directly benefit from the efficiency and transparency gains Contour’s network provides.

Contour’s development throughout 2020 has shown that considerable opportunities come with digitising international trade, with many successful transactions taking place during its Beta phase. Moving into 2021, Contour will be available to service corporates and banks across a wide range of regions and industries.

Carl Wegner, CEO at Contour, said: "A key focus for our network is to emphasise the interoperability and accessibility that Contour provides. Contour was developed to be used by the entire industry – from a small, yet international, corporate in a developing market to the world’s largest traders and banks. Our work with HSBC has shown the benefits this network provides and having them as a full production member highlights the value that we have been able to offer to the bank. As we round off 2020 – a year of significant challenges for trade – we hope to deliver a solution that is scalable, accessible and meets the demands of international trade today.”

HSBC has worked with Contour since before inception as a project in the R3 consortium, to its founding as an independent company, and its Beta Network in January 2020. Interoperability is a very big factor. Through its range of partners, HSBC will be able to decide which other technologies they can collaborate with on the network and further streamline their activity – whether it is through directly linking back-office systems to Contour’s network or digitising key documentation such as the bills of lading. This flexibility allows data to flow seamlessly between the Contour network and their customer’s chosen partners.

Vinay Mendonca, Global Head of Products and Propositions at HSBC, said: “HSBC is delighted to be Contour’s first production customer, using its commercialised blockchain trade finance platform. As the world’s largest trade bank, we’re constantly looking for innovative ways to build smarter businesses, serve our clients better and help them increase trade. We are proud to have been on this journey, developing blockchain technology to simplify documentary trade financing, since the very beginning. HSBC became the first bank to put a commercially viable letter-of-credit on a blockchain platform back in 2018. And it’s fitting that we are the first bank to use this solution commercially.”

HSBC continues to work with Contour to digitise international trade. Using Contour’s network, HSBC has been able to significantly reduced processing times for Letter of Credit (LC) presentations – from between 7 to 10 days to as quickly as 24 hours.

Today, PayU, the e-payments and fintech division of Prosus, announces the expansion of its offering to users of Wix eCommerce, a leading cloud-based web development platform, to serve small & medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Poland, the Czech Republic and Colombia. The partnership leverages the PayU Hub, a single API integration for global borderless online payments, and Wix’s e-commerce platform to enable fast, safe online payments for SMB merchants.

PayU has been integrated with the Wix eCommerce platform for merchants in India and Turkey since 2017. After integrating its payments services with Wix, iyzico (PayU Turkey) has seen an increase of 35% in the number of active merchants on the platform and of 115% in payment volumes from Q2 to Q3 2020.

Today’s announcement builds on the success of the PayU and Wix partnership in these markets, with the expansion of services to Poland, Czech Republic and Colombia. The ability to offer online purchases and digital payments became vital for many merchants overnight, particularly SMBs, in the wake of lockdowns with these three countries identified as having the strongest growth opportunities.

In Colombia, for example, PayU recorded a 48% increase in the number of SMB merchants onboarded in September 2020, compared to the same time last year.

Oren Levy, Chief Business Development Officer of Global Payments at PayU, said: “Today’s announcement is the next step in what has already proven to be a highly beneficial partnership. We are excited to replicate the success we’ve seen in India and Turkey and extend our combined services to SMB merchants operating in Poland, Czech Republic and Colombia at this crucial time. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen changes in consumer behaviours that would usually take decades happen in a matter of weeks. For merchants, the ability to transact quickly and seamlessly across borders can open up exponential opportunities”.

Vestrata, a fintech company providing integrated investment solutions, has launched today. The business is led by one of the most experienced teams ever assembled by a start-up in this space and has completed a US$4 million investment round to bring its innovative proposition to the wealth management and private banking sector.

Vestrata’s proprietary technology platform is unique, and will deliver a suite of discretionary, advisory, alternatives and ESG investment solutions that help wealth managers to drive improved client engagement, control risk and reduce cost. Vestrata’s services are developed in collaboration with leading asset managers, research houses and alternatives providers, and will be delivered through an integrated, scalable and modular platform.

The Vestrata leadership team includes seven former leaders from some of the largest wealth management institutions in the world. With more than 200 years of combined experience, the team brings a deep understanding of the complexity of delivering investment solutions that match clients’ needs and preferences.

The business is led by Mark Le Lievre, Co-Founder and CEO, who was previously global Head of Products and Platforms at J.P. Morgan Private Bank and Head of Investment Content at UBS Wealth Management. The wider management team includes a number of former executives from J.P. Morgan and other global financial institutions, including:

• Doug Wurth, Chairman, formerly led the international Private Bank and Alternatives businesses at J.P. Morgan
• Kim Lennen, CTO and Co-Founder, former CTO of J.P. Morgan Private Bank (Europe)
• Lea Blinoff, Head of Solutions, former Managing Director at J.P. Morgan
• Arun Sinha, CMO, former CMO of J.P. Morgan Wealth Management
• Eric Laget, Chief Legal Officer, former in-house counsel at J.P. Morgan Asset Management
• Tim Riseborough, CFO/COO, former COO at HSBC Commercial Bank
• Sarah Newman, CCO, former Head of Investment Products at Barclays Wealth Management

Mark Le Lievre, Co-founder and CEO of Vestrata, said: “We are entering an era where wealth managers will no longer be able to rely on market appreciation to drive revenue growth. We know from first-hand experience the significant and accelerating financial and regulatory challenges faced by the wealth management industry. Firms now need to focus not only on managing their cost base but growing their revenues via enhanced client engagement.

“We understand these challenges and have built a solution to address them. If firms are to engage with clients most effectively, they need to deliver differentiated investment solutions and use a sophisticated platform to enable advisors to engage their entire book of business. I am excited about the differentiated proposition we have built and the fundamental transformation that it will enable the wealth management industry to achieve in the years ahead.”

Lea Blinoff, Head of Solutions at Vestrata, said: “Our ambition is to fuse high-quality and differentiated investment solutions with advanced technology. Vestrata integrates a variety of investment solutions, products and asset classes with powerful portfolio analytics, reporting and a robust risk management framework to ensure advisors can deliver advice specifically tailored to their clients’ needs, in a scalable and compliant way. We enable the firms we work with to deliver more ideas to more clients, leading to revenue growth, improved control and enhanced client engagement.”

AnaCap Financial Partners (“AnaCap”), a leading financial services specialist mid-market private equity investor, today announces it has signed a deal for a third acquisition in the UK wealth management platform space with the purchase of Novia Financial (“Novia”).

Novia is the UK’s third largest independent investment and wrap platform by asset under management (“AuM”), having been established in 2008. It records an AuM figure of £8.15 billion and serves a client base of ~67,000 through more than 1,000 IFA firms. Novia operates one of the best technology offerings in the industry, spearheaded by its modern, adaptable and proprietary front-end.

Novia’s acquisition marks the third investment from AnaCap in the UK wealth management platform space and this news comes after AnaCap successfully signed Amber Financial Investments in July 2020 and Wealthtime in December 2019.

Across the three investments, AnaCap have now acquired almost £11 billion AuM and will continue to deploy its expertise in tech-enabled businesses and operational engagement to bolster the businesses organic expansion as well as continuing to identify attractive bolt-on acquisition opportunities.

AnaCap have signed 5 private equity deals in 2020 alone with a combined enterprise value greater than €500 million. 

Nassim Cherchali, Partner for M&A at AnaCap, commented: “We view this exciting acquisition of Novia as a truly fundamental deal in our strategy across the UK wealth management platform space. The investment means we have vastly increased our fund management and technological capabilities. We look forward to this next chapter, working with Novia’s impressive technology platform to increase its growth via planned investments into distribution and the building of in-house asset management capabilities.”

Bill Vasilieff, Chief Executive Officer at Novia, commented: “Novia was keen to partner with a company that had a strong track record in growing fintech businesses with innovative operational strategies. We believe that AnaCap represents the perfect choice to help us develop and, pending completion, we look forward to an exciting new chapter for the company in 2021 and beyond.”

The investment will be made from AnaCap Financial Partners III, L.P and its completion is subject to regulatory approval. Financial details and terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Glue42, the company that delivers integrated desktop experiences to financial institutions globally, and Chelmer, a pioneer wealth technology firm, today celebrated the culmination of a two-year relationship that saw the firms realize the industry’s vision for a simple, unified adviser desktop with the launch of Myriad, the latest release of Chelmer’s modern wealth management platform.  

The collaboration sees Chelmer embrace modern technology development standards with Glue42 Core, an open-source web integration platform, as the backbone of their product development with one goal in mind – simplified and personalized user experiences. All of Chelmer’s clients will be migrated to the latest version of Myriad in the next few months. 

Like many firms, Chelmer is conscious that despite the prowess of its own solutions, its platform constitutes only one part of end-to-end adviser and trader workflows. The team realized that to be a good desktop citizen, it had to make it incredibly easy for wealth management firms to integrate its software with other critical desktop applications. 

With this vision in mind, the wealth tech vendor decomposed its software suite and re-built all of its legacy applications as web-based “micro UI’s”, enabling their clients to create bespoke user interfaces with ease.  

Chelmer’s new technology stack also enables wealth management firms to personalize their internal processes and open up opportunities for new features and third-party data to be integrated faster than ever before.  

“The perception of needing eight screens of applications that that don’t talk to each other, represents a complete failure of technology,” said Andy Robertson, Chief Innovation Officer, Chelmer. “Involving Glue42 as a technology partner has enabled us to rebuild our core infrastructure and UI services so we can significantly reduce advisors’ screen real estate so they can manage their customers’ wealth more effectively and in less time.” 

“It supports digital transformation and personalization at scale,” he continued. “We can now evolve dynamically with our clients’ business – supporting growth and creating opportunities to expand their financial service offering.” 

“Advisors’ desktops have been under-performing for too long. Most wealth managers would probably give their desktops two to three marks out of ten for their performance and ease of use,” said James Wooster, COO, Glue42. "By embedding Glue42 Core into Chelmer’s Myriad, we’re giving their clients an unfair advantage when it comes to integrating other applications – not just Chelmer’s – further improving the overall experience.”  

New research from Nucleus Commercial Finance found that an overwhelming majority (96%) of consumers not only support their local independent businesses, but nearly two-thirds (63%) of those have made a conscious effort to do so since the pandemic  started earlier this year. 

The research indicates that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the attitudes of consumers, with 71% intending to spend more with their local businesses than they did last year, with 14% saying they would spend significantly more. Londoners (78%) were among those who said they would spend more. 

This shift has not gone unnoticed as SMEs have already experienced an upsurge in support from local customers, with 42% reporting that they are feeling better supported by locals since the pandemic started. Over three in five (63%) of larger SMEs also believe consumer attitudes have changed towards shopping locally since the pandemic. However, this is not felt by all SMEs, with 38% saying they have not noticed a difference.

Business size made a difference to consumer support with only a third of sole traders feeling supported by their local community compared to 52% for larger SMEs.

Nonetheless, there are still some consumers who prefer the convenience of shopping online, with 44% saying as such, while almost a quarter (22%) admit they thought the quality was better at major retailers.

Chirag Shah, CEO, Nucleus Commercial Finance, said: “It’s reassuring to see the pandemic has strengthened support for small and medium sized businesses in towns and communities across the country, and that our SMEs are witnessing this first-hand. 

“British Businesses have always been resilient throughout, and adapting to change, and this insight shows that the global pandemic is no different. The current climate is likely to present challenging times for many, so it’s vital SMEs explore the many options available to them, finding the finance that fits both their long-term and short-term business needs.”

For more information please visit www.nucleuscommercialfinance.com

Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPD Bank) has successfully gone live with Finastra’s cutting-edge treasury solution, Fusion Summit, in Hong Kong. With Fusion Summit’s advanced features, SPD Bank will be able to develop a broader and more sophisticated set of treasury services, helping it to grow its business in region even faster.

In recent years, SPD Bank has experienced steady growth in its treasury banking operations in Hong Kong. To facilitate further expansion in this line of business, SPD Bank’s strategic plan sees it developing a new range of treasury services and strengthening risk management.

“Our treasury banking operations in Hong Kong have experienced steady growth, but while our existing treasury solution enabled us to provide responsive customer service, its limited performance and risk management capabilities slowed our ability to expand and innovate,” said Zhang Hairong, Senior Technical Director of Development and IT, SPD Bank. “Fusion Summit addresses these issues and enables enhanced monitoring of our treasury business, better operational efficiency, as well as the tools to offer more varied services for our clients. Finastra was very supportive throughout the implementation and went the extra mile to make sure we could still deploy even in the face of the significant disruption caused by the pandemic. We look forward to continuing to work with Finastra as we move forward to the next stage of our growth journey.”

Fusion Summit offers detailed reporting that helps SPD Bank to manage its treasury business in real time. The solution also facilitates simple integration with different systems, enabling the bank to increase its operational efficiency across multiple business lines. The solution offers improved Straight Through Processing (STP), which provides customers with increased convenience by increasing trade processing capacity and accelerating the speed of trading.

As well as implementing Fusion Summit as a front-to-back solution to manage all treasury business, the bank is able to manage a wide range of sophisticated and interconnected asset classes effectively. This has allowed it to develop new treasury instruments, including repurchase agreements, callable and puttable bonds, bond forwards, interest rate derivatives and more.

“The collaborative approach taken between Finastra and SPD Bank meant we were able to successfully adapt to new working practices and continue in the face of COVID,” said Richard Zhu, Head of Asia East at Finastra. “Using Finastra’s Fusion Adopt methodology, which offers rapid implementation through standardization and proven business best practices, we carried out all user testing remotely and SPD Bank was able to roll out new remote working capabilities to its employees. With a well-defined and detailed plan, SPD Bank was able to migrate over 2,000 transactions and transitioned all system interfaces to Fusion Summit without issue. We look forward to helping SPD Bank with its growth journey.”

UK-based global FinTech payments group Paysend has today released its Annual Report and financial statements for the year ending 31st December 2019.

The report details the financial position of Paysend a matter of months before the Covid-19 pandemic and, in that period, it saw revenue grow by a 3.5 times multiple from 2018, up from £4.3 million to £15.1 million. The company had strong growth in both the B2C and B2B divisions of its business. The number of customers grew at 20% per month and ended 2019 at 1.3 million.

This was achieved by Paysend’s global expansion – it is now regulated in 45 countries and can deliver payments to over 90 countries – and by the quality of its service. Paysend has a leading Trust Pilot score for its sector. The B2B business, which focusses on the online SME market, also had strong growth in the year with revenue up 39% from 2018. Paysend continued to invest in its growth and the number of employees increased from 36 to 142.

Since the financial year end 2020 has been a year in which many FinTech firms struggled. Paysend has however managed to strengthen its position with its purely digital services ideally suited to the rapidly changing consumer and SME market. The number of customers has grown from 1.3 million to over 2.8 million in 2020 and the company is planning further expansion in 2021.

“The global pandemic has caught us all by surprise and companies like us have had to adapt quickly to changing customer requirements,” Ronnie Millar, Paysend CEO said. “We have enormous faith in the quality of our technology, and the strong relationships we have with our customers. We have continued to connect people all over the world as part of our global payments network, be they consumers or businesses.”

“Our growth in customer numbers is reflective of the hard work we’ve put in this year behind the scenes, and we will continue to drive forward with innovation and geographic expansion into 2021.”

Backbase, the Engagement Banking platform provider, today announced the opening of its new Global Development Center (BDC) in Krakow, Poland. The new BDC will enable Backbase to deliver end-to-end services for mobile and web development on the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform, allowing banks and financial institutions globally to successfully accelerate their digital transformation on Backbase’s Engagement Banking platform.

The new BDC is part of the Backbase strategy to provide instant digital execution power to financial institutions as they embark on their move to the BigTech single platform approach in banking. The center will also allow Backbase to build the infrastructure necessary for digital banking by leveraging its partner ecosystem. This allows financial institutions to focus on delivering hyper-personalized experiences for customers and generate new revenue streams, as well as offer employees the ability to better support and anticipate customer needs.

Backbase is expected to recruit 120 employees for its new BDC in front-end and back-end roles as well as customer success, business analyst, project management, user experience.

Jeroen Brusker, Senior Vice President, Global Customer Success, Backbase, said: “Backbase’s new Global Development Center will allow our teams to function as a start-up accelerator within financial institutions, running a successful digital transformation where dedicated experts work on specific missions alongside existing business teams. With our new center, Backbase makes digital talent and best-practices available at scale to provide instant innovation power to banks across the globe.” 

CEO for Backbase, Jouk Pleiter, said: “We are extremely pleased to launch our new Global Backbase Development Center, highlighting our commitment to transform the global banking system, which is at the crossroads of the platform economy. With our continued investment in strategic services and solutions, Backbase will be able to support banks and financial institutions globally to create  seamless and captivating experiences for customers.”